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Christopher Strachey (1916–1975) was a British computer scientist.
Strachey was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design. He worked at the Manchester Computing Machine Laboratory while teaching at Harrow School and in 1952, after encouragement from Alan Turing, wrote a program that could "play a complete game of draughts at a reasonable speed". He collaborated with Dana Scott and Peter Landin in the 1960s and went on to work in Cambridge and Oxford universities, becoming the director of the Programming Research Group at the latter.
He developed the Combined Programming Language (CPL) and, as seen in the C programming language, the distinction between L- and R-values. While he did not invent the function, Strachey coined the term Currying.
He was instrumental in the design of the Ferranti PEGASUS computer. An interesting quote in that regard is "Optimum programming is to be avoided because it tends to become a time-wasting intellectual hobby of the programmers" (slightly paraphrased).
See also
References
- Copeland, B.J. (June 2000). "A Brief History of Computing" at AlanTuring.net
- Campbell-Kelly, M. Christopher Strachey, 1916–1975 — A Biographical Note, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol.7, No.1, pp.19–42, 1985.
External links
1916 births | 1975 deaths | British academics | British computer scientists | Members of Oxford University Computing Laboratory | Computer pioneers | Computer scientists | British schoolteachers | Formal methods people
"Christopher Strachey"